The Girl on the Fridge: Stories (5 page)

That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and my husband was a retired colonel. He was running a community center in a poor neighborhood, and his social skills were shit. His workers hated him because he kept yelling at them. They complained that he treated them like they were in basic training. Every morning I’d make him an omelet, and for supper a veal cutlet with mashed potatoes. When he was in a decent mood, he’d say the food tasted good. He never offered to clear the table. Once a month or so, he’d bring home a bouquet of dead flowers that immigrant kids used to sell at the intersection where the lights were really slow.

That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and that I was having cramps, and it’s nighttime, and suddenly I realize I’m all out of tampons, and I try to wake my husband, who’s a retired colonel, and ask him to go to the all-night pharmacy or to drive me there at least, because I don’t have a driver’s license, and even if I did, he still has an army car I’m not allowed to drive. I tell him it’s an emergency, but he won’t go, just keeps mumbling in his sleep, saying the meal was lousy, and that if the cooks thought they were getting furlough, they could just forget it, because this was the army and not some fucking summer camp. I stuffed in a folded Kleenex and tried lying on my back without breathing, to keep it from leaking. But my whole body hurt, and the blood was gushing out of me, sounding like a broken sewage pipe. It leaked over my hips, and my legs, and splashed over my stomach. And the tissue turned into a wad that stuck to my hair and my skin.

That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and that I was disgusted with myself, with my life. With not having a driver’s license, with not knowing English, with never having been abroad. The blood that had dripped all over me was beginning to harden, and it felt like a kind of curse. Like my period would never end.

That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and that I fell asleep and dreamed I was a twenty-seven-year-old man who gets his wife pregnant, and then finishes medical school and forces her and the baby to join him when he goes to do his residency abroad. They suffer terribly. They don’t know a word of English. They don’t have any friends, and it’s cold outside, and snowing. And then, one Sunday, I take them on a picnic and spread out the blanket on the lawn, and they put out the food they’ve brought. And after we finish eating, I take out a hunting rifle and I shoot them like dogs. The policemen come to my house. The finest detectives in the Bloomington police force try to make me confess. They put me in this room, they yell at me, they won’t let me smoke, they won’t let me go to the bathroom, but I don’t crack. And my husband beside me in bed keeps yelling, “I don’t give a goddamn how you did it before. Around here I’m the commander now!”

In November ’93, Dov Genichovsky announced the new municipal tax collection ordinance on national radio. My mother, who even at fifty-three was still a raving beauty, had begun to drag her feet across the floor. Her smile stayed the same, she felt the same when you hugged her, she still had plenty of strength in her arms, but now when she walked she shuffled her feet. If you looked hard at the X-rays, you could spot black worms drilling into her kidneys. My birthday was coming up. The date’s very easy to remember: December 21, 12/21. I knew she’d be planning something special, like every other year.

The winter of ’93 was probably the coldest winter of my life. I was living on my own, sleeping in sweats and socks, and every night, I’d make sure to tuck the top deep into my pants so if I turned in my sleep, my back wouldn’t be exposed. The Channel Two project had just fallen through, the paper wouldn’t give me a raise, and my ex-girlfriend was going around town telling everyone I was gay and impotent. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with my armpits reeking of decay. I’d call her, and as a precaution I’d put my hand over the receiver even when I was dialing—and when she’d answer I’d hang up. I was convinced I was getting back at her, big time.

We put off my birthday by a day, because on the evening of the twentieth the paper sent me to an observatory to bring back a thousand words about a meteor belt that traveled past us only every hundred years. I asked if I could write about the settler from Hebron who’d been hit in the head and turned into a vegetable, but they told me it wasn’t my beat. My beat was human interest. Every week I had to come up with a human interest feature for pages 16–17 of the supplement, so that anyone who’d made it through the security-crime-finance-politics stories would get a bonus: a world convention of veterinarians, skateboard championship of the universe, something upbeat. I kept pushing for the settler who’d gotten whacked on the head with a brick. I identified with him. His project had fallen through, too. His prospects had dimmed. But my editor turned me down, again, so I headed for the Hadera Observatory with a photographer I’d never met. This photographer told me he’d been pissed off at the paper for the past month or so. He had in his possession the picture of a soldier who’d been murdered in the territories—a blood-and-gore shot of the guy’s head skewered on a spike—and the editor was too pussy to print it. He’d said it was cheap.

“I wonder what he’d say about David fucking Lynch,” said the photographer, taking it out on the stick shift of the rental. “Or Peckinpah—I guess he’s ‘cheap’ too. The picture I shot of that Almakayess guy doesn’t belong in a paper. It belongs in a fucking museum.”

I tried to guess what my mother would be setting up for my birthday. The present would probably be a mini–cassette recorder. That was the thing I needed most, anyway. And for the occasion she’d bake me a carrot cake because it’s my favorite. We’d sit around and chat, my brother would drive in especially from Raanana. My dad would tell me how proud he was of me, and he’d show me a scrapbook with all the stories I’ve written pasted on the black pages. I don’t know why, but it made me think of my tenth birthday, how the whole class came, and my parents hired a magician.

The photographer and I reached the observatory. It was freezing, and I was supposed to be talking with all the meteor buffs who were hanging around there, getting copy. The people I met told me these weren’t just meteors that move past us every one hundred years, but a group of meteors that passes by planet Earth once in seven centuries. My tape recorder wasn’t working, so I had to take everything down in longhand.

“This is fucked up,” the photographer griped. “People on the West Bank are slaughtering each other, and here I am shooting a bunch of shortsighted dorks in parkas jerking off on a telescope. Those moon rocks better come out good.” Besides the cake, my mother would make the spaghetti I love, and carrot soup. And whenever she headed back toward the kitchen with that tired walk, I’d want to die.

The meteors came, the way they do every seven hundred years, and the photographer said it looked like shit and would look even shittier in the paper. If they were going to take so long coming around, he said, the least they could do was make it worth our while. And I kept thinking that if there was no magician, those meteors should come to our house instead. And burn everything down. My mother, my brother, the worms in her guts, me, with my fifteen hundred words for pages 16–17. That would make everyone happy. Even my ex-girlfriend would sleep easier at night. Like that birthday with the magician, when the coins kept spilling out of my brother’s ears and mine. When my mother floated on air like a ballerina on the moon, when my father just smiled and said nothing.

She had this vague look in her eyes, half disappointed, half what’s-the-difference. Like someone who realized he bought skim milk by mistake and doesn’t have the energy to take it back. “It’s really nice,” she said, putting the cactus in a corner of the room. Then she said, “Look, Yoav, I don’t know what you have in mind, it’s just important to me that you know I’m living here with someone.”

Once, I thought it was extremely important for my girlfriend to be pretty. It was essential that she be smart and we had to be in love and all that, but I really, really wanted her to be pretty, too. I was reading a lot of comic books in those days. My hero was The Vision. He could fly, he could walk through walls. He could kill you with a look. The Vision wasn’t a person, he was an android. You couldn’t tell from looking at him, he had a girlfriend and everything. He was special. He didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met. He had a red face with a jewel in the middle of his forehead and a green suit. The Vision always wore green no matter what.

Sometimes I’d bump into her at parties. She’d come with her boyfriend. He looked okay, but ordinary. She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met. When they stood together at a party, surrounded by dozens of people, you could tell just by looking who was the lead and who was the extra. She deserved better, and I knew it. I could have shaken her, I wanted to snatch her away. I didn’t understand why I never said a word.

The Vision may have been made of synthetics, but he had lots of feelings. In one book he even cried. It was on the last page, and the caption read “Even an android can cry.” He was big. He was a giant. He was the leader of the Avengers. Her boyfriend and I once peed next to each other in a campus bathroom, and his urine came out dark yellow. I wanted to kill him. For myself, but also because he defiled her with that ordinariness of his. I saw myself drowning him in the toilet, killing him with a death stare. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. He shook himself twice, put it in his pants, and zipped up. He didn’t even flush. When he finished washing his hands, he put them under the dryer. I could have smashed his head against the mirror, the sink, the floor, a hundred places. He smiled at me, completely unafraid, and walked out.

I was mad at myself. I felt terrible. I knew the feeling would never end, like a headache that won’t go away. I looked in the filthy mirror across from me. I was special, I didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met. I could have shaken myself, I wanted to snatch myself away. I knew I deserved better. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t said a word.

Ronit got married in August. Her boyfriend became her husband. According to my parents, he’s a very nice guy, but I knew. He won’t go through walls for her. Neither will I. I did go through glass once. At a student demonstration. Two policemen threw me through a store window. A few years later, we met on the street. She had a baby. She asked me what the scar was from, then she started to cry. “God,” she said. “What they did to your face.” I gave the baby my death stare. It didn’t work. Five seconds later he was crying too. “God, you were so beautiful,” she said, wiping her face with a diaper. She never even noticed her baby screaming. Once, I’d have gone through walls for her.

On Yom Kippur Eve, the quanta went to ask Einstein for his forgiveness. “I’m not home,” Einstein yelled at them from behind his locked door. On their way back, people swore loudly at them through the windows, and someone even threw a can. The quanta pretended not to care, but deep in their hearts they were really hurt. Nobody understands the quanta, everybody hates them.

“You parasites,” people would shout at them as they walked down the road.

“Go serve in the army.”

“We wanted to, actually,” the quanta would try to explain, “but the army wouldn’t take us because we’re so tiny.” Not that anyone listened. Nobody listens to the quanta when they try to defend themselves, but when they say something that can be interpreted negatively, well, then everyone’s all ears. The quanta can make the most innocent statement, like “Look, there’s a cat!” and right away they’re saying on the news how the quanta were stirring up trouble and they rush off to interview Schrödinger. All in all, the media hated the quanta worse than anybody, because once the quanta had spoken at an IBM conference about how the very act of viewing had an effect on an event, and all the journalists thought the quanta were lobbying to keep them from covering the Intifada. The quanta could insist as much as they wanted that this wasn’t at all what they meant and that they had no political agenda whatsoever, but nobody would believe them anyway. Everyone knew they were friends of the government’s Chief Scientist.

Loads of people think the quanta are indifferent, that they have no feelings, but it simply isn’t true. On Friday, after the program about the bombing of Hiroshima, they were interviewed in the studio in Jerusalem. They could barely talk. They just sat there facing the open mike and sniffling, and all the viewers at home, who didn’t know the quanta very well, thought they were avoiding the question and didn’t realize the quanta were crying. What’s sad is that even if the quanta were to write dozens of letters to the editors of all the scientific journals in the world and prove beyond a doubt that when it came to the atom bomb they had simply been used, and that people had taken advantage of their naïveté, and that they’d never ever imagined it would end that way, it wouldn’t do them any good, because nobody understands the quanta. The physicists least of all.

I touch her hands, her face, her pussy, her shirt. And I say to her, “Roni, please. Take it off, for me.” But she won’t. So I back down and we start fooling around again, completely naked, almost. The tag on her shirt says the material is one hundred percent cotton. It’s supposed to feel good, but it’s scratchy. Nothing is one hundred percent, that’s what she always says. Ninety-nine point nine, tops. And that’s when you’re lucky. And then she crosses her fingers for luck.

I hate that shirt. It’s itchy on my face, it doesn’t let me feel how warm her body is, or if she’s sweating like me. And I say it again: “Roni, please.” It comes out a quiet scream, like the sound of someone biting his cheek with his mouth closed. “I’m coming. Please take it off.” She won’t budge. She never does.

It’s crazy. We’ve been together six months and I still haven’t seen her naked. Six months, and my friends are still telling me not to make the next move. Six months of living together and they keep on telling me stories that all of them already know by heart. How she stood in front of the mirror and tried to cut her breasts off with a kitchen knife because she hated her body. How she was hospitalized, more than once. And they tell me those stories about her as if she were a stranger, while they’re drinking our coffee from our mugs. They tell me not to get in over my head when we’re already madly in love. It makes me want to strangle them, but I don’t say anything. At most, I ask them to cut it out and I hate them silently. What can they tell me that I don’t already know? What can they say that would make me love her even a tiny bit less?

I try to explain it to her. How it doesn’t matter. How what we have is so strong that nothing can destroy it, then I cross my fingers for luck because she says so. How I know, how I’ve already been told, I know what’s there and I couldn’t care less. But it doesn’t help. Nothing helps. She won’t budge. The furthest we ever got was after a bottle of Chianti at a New Year’s party, and even then, she only undid one button.

After the test comes back, she calls her girlfriend, who did it once, to find out about the procedure. She doesn’t want an abortion, I can feel that. I don’t want one either. That’s what I tell her. I get down on my knees, like in the movies, and ask her to marry me: “Come on, babe,” I say in my best Dean Martin voice. “Let’s ring-a-ding-ding.” She laughs; she says no. She asks if this is because of her being pregnant, but she knows it isn’t. Five minutes later, she says okay, but on the condition that, if it’s a boy, we call him Yotam. We shake on it. I try to get up, but my legs have fallen asleep.

That night, we get into bed. We kiss. We undress. Only the shirt stays on. She pushes me away. She unbuttons a button. And another one, slowly, like a stripper, one hand holding the collar closed, the other undoing the next button down. After she’s gone through them all, she looks at me, looks deep into my eyes. I’m gasping for breath. She lets the shirt fall open. And I see, I see what’s underneath. Nothing could destroy what there is between us, nothing, that’s what I always said. How could I ever have been so stupid?